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Combining surveys and digital trace data can enhance the analytic potential of both data types. We present two studies that examine factors influencing data sharing behaviour of survey respondents for different types of digital trace data: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and health app data. Across those data types, we compared the relative impact of four factors on data sharing: data sharing method, respondent characteristics, sample composition and incentives. The results show that data sharing rates differ substantially across data types. Two particularly important factors predicting data sharing behaviour are the incentive size and data sharing method, which are both directly related to task difficulty and respondent burden. In sum, the paper reveals systematic variation in the willingness to share additional data which need to be considered in research designs linking surveys and digital traces.

Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, with the drastic reduction of data access via the Facebook APIs following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, this data source has essentially become unavailable to academic researchers. Hence, there is a need for different modes of data access for what Freelon (2018) has called the 'post-API age'. One promising approach is to directly collaborate with platform users to ask them to share (parts of) their personal Facebook data with researchers. This paper presents experiences from two studies employing such approaches. The first used a browser plugin to unobtrusively observe Facebook use while users are active. The second asked participants to export and share parts of their personal Facebook data archive. While both approaches yield promising insights suitable to extend or replace self-reports, both also entail specific limitations. We discuss and compare the unique advantages and limitations of both approaches and provide a list of recommendations for future research.

Given that Facebook is still the most widely used social networking site in the world, its influence on democratic processes is under constant scrutiny. Academics have put a special focus on Facebook's role in inhibiting or enhancing citizens' news exposure. Recent studies using digital behavioral data have analyzed the prevalence and effects of "Facebook news referrals". Using a web tracking tool that captures general browsing behavior as well as public posts seen on Facebook, this paper lays the groundwork for the field by assessing the validity of previously proposed operationalizations. We validate news referrals by investigating whether different measures actually reflect exposure to a news URL a user saw on Facebook. We furthermore assess the effects of news referrals on central outcomes in extant literature, contingent on different operationalizations. The results show that the most precise measure of news referrals are referral IDs attached as parameters to news URLs by Facebook. Still, the substantive findings are broadly comparable across approaches, lending further credibility to published research, despite measurement errors. The paper demonstrates the need for academics to constantly innovate in order to measure citizens' online behavior in an ecologically valid manner.

Online intermediaries such as social network sites or search engines are playing an increasingly central role in democracy by acting as mediators between information producers and citizens. Academic and public commentators have raised persistent concerns that algorithmic recommender systems would negatively affect the provision of political information by tailoring content to the predispositions and entertainment preferences of users. At the same time, recent research indicates that intermediaries foster exposure to news that people would not use as part of their regular media diets. This study investigates these unresolved questions by combining the web browsing histories and survey responses of more than 7,000 participants from six major democracies. The analysis shows that despite generally low levels of news use, using online intermediaries fosters exposure to nonpolitical and political news across countries and personal characteristics. The findings have implications for scholarly and public debates on the challenges that high-choice digital media environments pose to democracy

This study examines the growing journalistic practice of embedding full tweets in online political news coverage. Against the background of a hybrid media system, we pursue three research goals. Fi...

How is political news shared online? This fundamental question for political communication research in today’s news ecology is still poorly understood. In particular, very little is known about whether and how news sharing differs from news viewing. Based on a unique dataset of ≈ 870,000 URLs shared ≈ 100 million times on Facebook, grouped by countries, age brackets, and months, we study the correlates of viewing versus sharing of political versus non-political news. We first identify websites that at least occasionally contain news items, and then analyze metrics of the news items published on these websites. We enrich the dataset with natural language processing and super- vised machine learning. We find that political news items are viewed less than non-political news items, but are shared more than one would expect based on their views. Furthermore, the source of a news item and textual features, which are often studied in clickbait research and in commercial A/B testing, matter. Our findings are conditional on age, but are very similar across four different countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Poland). While our research design does not allow for causal claims, our findings suggest that future work is well-advised to both theoretically and methodologically differentiate between factors that may explain (a) viewing versus sharing of news, and (b) political versus non-political news.

How is political news shared online? This fundamental question for political communication research in today’s news ecology is still poorly understood. In particular, very little is known about whether and how news sharing differs from news viewing. Based on a unique dataset of ≈ 870,000 URLs shared ≈ 100 million times on Facebook, grouped by countries, age brackets, and months, we study the correlates of viewing versus sharing of political versus non-political news. We first identify websites that at least occasionally contain news items, and then analyze metrics of the news items published on these websites. We enrich the dataset with natural language processing and super- vised machine learning. We find that political news items are viewed less than non-political news items, but are shared more than one would expect based on their views. Furthermore, the source of a news item and textual features, which are often studied in clickbait research and in commercial A/B testing, matter. Our findings are conditional on age, but are very similar across four different countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Poland). While our research design does not allow for causal claims, our findings suggest that future work is well-advised to both theoretically and methodologically differentiate between factors that may explain (a) viewing versus sharing of news, and (b) political versus non-political news.

Recent research by Taneja et al. suggested that digital infrastructures diminish the generational gap in news use by counteracting preference structures. We expand on this seminal work by arguing that an infrastructural perspective requires overcoming limitations of highly aggregated web tracking data used in prior research. We analyze the individual browsing histories of two representative samples of German Internet users collected in 2012 ( N = 2970) and 2018 ( N = 2045) and find robust evidence for a smaller generational gap in online news use than commonly assumed. While short news website visits mostly demonstrated infrastructural factors, longer news use episodes were shaped more by preferences. The infrastructural role of social media corresponded with reduced news avoidance and more varied news repertoires. Overall, the results suggest that research needs to reconsider commonly held premises regarding the uses of digital media in modern high-choice settings.

How transnational are European Parliament (EP) campaigns? Building on research on the Euro-pean public sphere and the politicisation of the EU, this study investigates to what extent the 2019 EP campaign was transnational and which factors were associated with ‘going transna-tional’. It conceptualises Twitter linkages of EP candidates as constitutive elements of a transna-tional campaign arena distinguishing interactions with EP candidates from other countries (hori-zontal transnationalisation) and interactions with the supranational European party families and lead candidates (vertical transnationalisation). The analysis of tweets sent by EP candidates from all 28 member states reveals that most linkages remain national. Despite this evidence for the second-order logic, there are still relevant variations contingent on EU positions of parties, the adoption of the Spitzenkandidaten system and socialisation in the EP. The findings have impli-cations for debates on the European public sphere and institutional reform proposals such as transnational party lists that might mitigate the EU’s democratic deficit.

The Spitzenkandidaten were meant to personalize European Parliament elections. This paper asks whether and through which channels the lead candidates were actually able to make themselves known among voters – a necessary precondition for any electoral effect. Combining panel surveys and online tracking data, the study explores candidate learning during the German 2019 European Parliament election campaign and relates learning to different types of news exposure, with a special focus on online news. The results show that learning was limited and unevenly distributed across candidates. However exposure to candidate-specific online news and most types of offline news helped to acquire knowledge. The findings imply that Spitzenkandidaten stick to voters’ minds when they get exposed to them, but that exposure is infrequent in high-choice media environments.

While survey research has been at the heart of social science for decades and social scientific research with digital trace data has been growing rapidly in the last few years, until now, there are relatively few studies that combine these two data types. This may be surprising given the potential of linking surveys and digital trace data, but at the same time, it is important to note that the collection and analysis of such linked data are challenging in several regards. The three key issues are: (1) data linking including informed consent for individual-level studies, (2) methodological and ethical issues impeding the scientific (re)analysis of linked survey and digital trace data sets, and (3) developing conceptual and theoretical frameworks tailored toward the multidimensionality of such data. This special issue addresses these challenges by presenting cutting-edge methodological work on how to best collect and analyze linked data as well as studies that have successfully combined survey data and digital trace data to find innovative answers to relevant social scientific questions.

Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet’s promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal–agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign’s social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns.

Climate change and populism are two major phenomena in contemporary politics. Recent successes of populist parties and politicians, especially in Europe and in the US, have given rise to extensive debates in the academic literature and beyond. Yet the link between populism and climate change scepticism (henceforth ‘scepticism’), has so far received little attention. This paper examines the link between scepticism and populism by means of a unique dataset: a survey and detailed web browsing histories of participants from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and the UK. The web tracking data includes more than 150 million website visits over a period of three months and the survey contains questions about political attitudes and attitudes towards climate change. We analyse the 8893 websites which contained ‘climate change’ and its cognates in the URLs and link these website visits and the content of these websites to the political attitudes and climate change orientation of those who visited them. The contribution is both methodological (linking surveys and web tracking data, including cross-country comparison) and substantive (uncovering links between populists, their climate change orientations, and the content of related websites they visited). Our analysis demonstrates the value of computational methods in political communication research and provides insights into the link between populists and climate change scepticism.

Soziale Medien haben in den vergangenen Jahren erheblich an Einfluss in der politischen Kommunikation gewonnen. Deshalb wenden sich auch Politiker in Deutschland Plattformen wie Facebook und Twitter zu, um Wahler zu erreichen. Die akademischen Studien zum deutschen Fall beschranken sich allerdings bis auf wenige Ausnahmen auf die Online-Aktivitaten und Netzwerke von Politikern, ohne einen (uber deren Parteizugehorigkeit hinausgehenden) systematischen Konnex mit bekannten Bestimmungsfaktoren fur Kampagnenaktivitaten aus der „Offline-Welt“ herzustellen (z. B. Lietz et al. 2014; Nuernbergk/Conrad 2016). Zudem dienten als Datengrundlage lediglich kleinere Samples von Accounts der Bundesparteien bzw. der Spitzenkandidaten oder selbstselektierte Teilnehmende an Kandidatenbefragungen (z. B. Quinlan et al. 2018). Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Nutzung der beiden Online-Netzwerke mit der hochsten Relevanz in der politischen Kommunikation – Facebook und Twitter – durch samtliche Kandidaten der grosen deutschen Parteien fur die Bundestagswahl 2017. Wir berucksichtigen als erklarende Variablen individuelle Charakteristika (z. B. Alter, Geschlecht), strukturelle Variablen (z. B. Wahlkreischarakteristika, Ost/West) und politische Einflussfaktoren (z. B. Parteizugehorigkeit, Platzierung auf Parteiliste, Direkt- vs. Listenkandidat).

How transnational are European Parliament (EP) campaigns? Building on research on the European public sphere and the politicisation of the EU, this study investigates to what extent the 2019 EP campaign was transnational and which factors were associated with ‘going transnational’. It conceptualises Twitter linkages of EP candidates as constitutive elements of a transnational campaign arena distinguishing interactions with EP candidates from other countries (horizontal transnationalisation) and interactions with the supranational European party families and lead candidates (vertical transnationalisation). The analysis of tweets sent by EP candidates from all 28 member states reveals that most linkages remain national. Despite this evidence for the second-order logic, there are still relevant variations contingent on EU positions of parties, the adoption of the Spitzenkandidaten system and socialisation in the EP. The findings have implications for debates on the European public sphere and institutional reform proposals such as transnational party lists that might mitigate the EU’s democratic deficit.

Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes and the consumption of various types of online news. To test our theoretical assumptions, we link 150 million Web site visits by 7,729 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to their responses in an online survey. This design allows us to measure media exposure more precisely than previous studies while linking these data to demographic attributes and political attitudes of participants. The results show that populist attitudes leave pronounced marks in people’s news diets, but the evidence is heterogeneous and highly contingent on the supply side of a country’s media system. Most importantly, citizens with populist attitudes visit less Web sites from the legacy press, while consuming more hyperpartisan news. Despite these tendencies, the Web tracking data show that populist citizens still primarily get their news from established sources. We discuss the implications of these results for the current state of public spheres in democracies.

This article tests the assumption that candidates’ attack behavior is a result of their rational consideration of potential benefits and likely risks. Based on candidate surveys from three German state elections, we demonstrate that (i) attacks are an important strategy; (ii) on balance, candidates regard attacking opponents as a costly instead of a beneficial strategy; (iii) the differential between benefits and costs is positively associated with attack behavior; nevertheless, most candidates attack at least sometimes even when costs exceed benefits; (iv) candidate characteristics and the electoral context are rarely reflected in benefit-cost calculations; and (v) the theoretically assumed mediating role of the benefit-cost differential on attack behavior applies only to some explanatory factors. While the findings provide some evidence for rational choice explanations of negative campaigning, they also challenge some central assumptions. As such, they demonstrate the need for more comprehensive theoretical explanations and measurements of negative campaigning.

Purpose: To analyze the energetic profile of the Basketball Exercise Simulation Test (BEST). Methods: Ten male elite junior basketball players (age 15.5 [0.6] y, height 180 [9] cm, and body mass 66.1 [11.2] kg) performed a modified BEST (20 circuits consisting of jumping, sprinting, jogging, shuffling, and short breaks) simulating professional basketball game play. Circuit time, sprint time, sprint decrement, oxygen uptake (VO2), heart rate, and blood lactate concentration (blc) were obtained. Metabolic energy and metabolic power above rest (Wtot and Ptot), as well as energy share in terms of aerobic (Waer), glycolytic (Wblc), and high-energy phosphates (WPCr), were calculated from VO2 during exercise, net lactate production, and the fast component of postexercise VO2 kinetics, respectively. Results: Waer, Wblc, and WPCr reflect 89% (2%), 5% (1%), and 6% (1%) of total energy needed, respectively. Assuming an aerobic replenishment of PCr energy stores during short breaks, the adjusted energy share yielded Waer 66% (4%), Wblc 5% (1%), and WPCr 29% (1%). Waer and WPCr were negatively correlated (−0.72 and −0.59) with sprint time, which was not the case for Wblc. Conclusions: Consistent with general findings on energy system interaction during repeated high-intensity exercise bouts, the intermittent profile of the BEST relies primarily on aerobic energy combined with repetitive supplementation by anaerobic utilization of high-energy phosphates.

There is an ongoing academic debate whether social media empowers activists and advocacy groups in relation to established political actors and media gatekeepers. This article investigates these premises by analysing the influence of various actors in two policy debates on Twitter, environmental policy (climate change) and Internet governance (net neutrality). We extract tweets on both topics and code the respective 500 most central accounts according to a categorisation of relevant political actor groups. Applying methods from social network analysis, we reveal temporally fluctuating actor constellations and network structures which converge to elite actors during high attention periods. Furthermore, a comparative keyword analysis shows that non-governmental organisations and citizen media emphasise personalised connective action frames, whereas political actors and traditional media tend to refer to the political decision-making process and its institutions. Both findings are in line with cyclical conceptions of policy processes.

It is often assumed that the Internet would threaten the survival of authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, most country-comparative studies have identified a democracy advantage in Internet diffusion. This paper revisits these technology-centric assumptions by conceptualizing the adoption of the Internet as a dynamic phenomenon with multiple phases that unfold differently depending on the political system. It is argued theoretically, that initially, the Internet diffuses faster in democracies because of inherent innovation advantages. However, authoritarian regimes adopt the Internet at comparable rates when the economic benefits of the technology outweigh the democratization risks. Yearly cross-sectional regressions for the years 1996–2013 show that the relationship between regime type and Internet diffusion varies temporally as authoritarian regimes have caught up considerably. Since 2013, there are no significant differences between democracies and authoritarian regimes anymore and monarchies even outperform democracies.

Research has prominently assumed that social media and web portals that aggregate news restrict the diversity of content that users are exposed to by tailoring news diets toward the users’ preferences. In our empirical test of this argument, we apply a random-effects within–between model to two large representative datasets of individual web browsing histories. This approach allows us to better encapsulate the effects of social media and other intermediaries on news exposure. We find strong evidence that intermediaries foster more varied online news diets. The results call into question fears about the vanishing potential for incidental news exposure in digital media environments.

Inwiefern digitale Medien politische Prozesse beeinflussen ist eine intensiv diskutierte Frage inner- und außerhalb der Politikwissenschaft. Besondere Prominenz in dieser Debatte hat dabei die Hypothese sogenannter „Echokammern“ gewonnen, wonach digitale Medien ihre Nutzer darin bestärken, insbesondere solche Nachrichten zu beziehen, deren politische Positionierung sie teilen, und dadurch zu einer gesellschaftlichen Polarisierung beitragen. Während Echokammern in der öffentlichen Debatte zumeist unkritisch als gegeben betrachtet werden, wird das Konzept im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs zunehmend hinterfragt. Als Herausforderungen erweisen sich dabei eine schwache theoretische Aufarbeitung des Phänomens, ein stark zersplittertes Forschungsfeld und eine mangelnde Generalisierbarkeit von Forschungsergebnissen aufgrund des primären Fokus auf den US-amerikanischen Kontext. Der vorliegende Beitrag begegnet diesen Problemstellungen und gibt einen detaillierten Überblick über das Forschungsfeld. Der Literaturüberblick trägt dabei zur theoretischen Erfassung des Untersuchungsgegenstands bei, insbesondere durch eine explizite Differenzierung zwischen Fragmentierung und Polarisierung, und berücksichtigt außerdem länderspezifische Variationen. Insgesamt kommt dieser Überblick zu dem Schluss, dass die im öffentlichen Diskurs geäußerte Furcht vor einer gesamtgesellschaftlichen Fragmentierung durch digitale Medien und einer damit verbundenen politischen Polarisierung empirisch nicht unterstützt wird. So ist aufbauend auf die bisherige Forschung keine Fragmentierung öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeit entlang politischer Präferenzen feststellbar. Auch auf der Wirkungsebene der Polarisierung sprechen die bisherigen Erkenntnisse gegen die vereinfachten Annahmen der Echokammer-Hypothese. Dennoch sind die bisherigen wissenschaftlichen Befunde aufgrund von Limitationen im Datenzugang noch nicht umfassend genug. Der Beitrag verdeutlicht, dass die politische Kommunikationsforschung insbesondere von innovativen, extern validen Designs und komparativer Forschung außerhalb des US-Kontexts profitieren würde.

Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the belief that “news finds me” (NFM). Notably, the three dimensions of NFM—feeling informed, relying on peers, and not actively seeking news—combine intentions and perceptions related to news use. Understanding NFM perceptions, hence, requires an analytical distinction between active and passive modes of news use as well as reliable measures of (different types of) news exposure. We contribute to this field by combining a survey, tracked web-browsing data, and tracked Facebook data to investigate the relationship between NFM perceptions and exposure to online news, also taking into account political knowledge and interest as traditional predictors of active news use. Our results show that both political knowledge and interest are associated with more news exposure via web browsers and that political knowledge—but not political interest—is also associated with more news in people’s Facebook feeds. Compared with the NFM dimensions, political knowledge and interest are stronger predictors of online news exposure in our study. Taken together, the novel combination of Facebook and web tracking data provides evidence that online news exposure is shaped by a confluence of traditional factors and more diffuse interpersonal processes.

In das Internet werden regelmasig Hoffnungen hinsichtlich einer Transnationalisierung und Demokratisierung politischer Offentlichkeiten gesetzt. Der vorliegende Beitrag diskutiert diese politiktheoretischen Annahmen und uberpruft die Erwartungen anhand einer empirischen Analyse der Twitter-Kommunikation zu den Politikfeldern Netzpolitik (Netzneutralitat) und Umweltpolitik (Klimawandel). Die Ergebnisse lassen eine Transnationalisierung von Twitter-Kommunikation erkennen, deren Auspragung allerdings an politikfeldspezifische Charakteristika gebunden ist. Eine weitreichende Egalisierung politischer Beteiligung ist nicht festzustellen, da die klassischen medialen und politischen Gatekeeper in den themengebundenen Twitter-Netzwerken weiterhin eine zentrale Rolle einnehmen.

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This chapter presents a multi-method discourse analytical approach to analyse Twitter communication on two political issues of global concern: environmental policy/climate change and internet governance/net neutrality. Their corpus is compiled from Twitter messages containing #NetNeutrality or #ClimateChange which the authors gathered between January and March 2015. First, they map and compare the geographical landscapes of the two policy fields by using geolocation information from the Twitter API and the Data Science Toolkit. Step 2 consists in a comparative network analysis defining Twitter users as nodes and Retweets (RT) and mentions (@) as links. Finally, in a third step, the authors apply keyword analysis to identify discursive patterns. Combining these three methods allows the authors to assess the degree of transnationalisation in the two fields.

Mass media is critical for the functioning of every contemporary political system. Thus, we can expect a variation in media freedom depending on the type of government since political regimes differ with regard to the political, legal and economic framework in which news coverage operates. This article investigates the effects of regime types, namely democracy and autocratic subtypes, on media freedom. It is argued that regime legitimation and governance are the driving forces behind diverging media policies in autocracies. From this theory, hypotheses regarding media freedom and regime type are derived and tested empirically, relying on statistical analyses that cover 149 countries over a period from 1993 to 2010. The empirical results demonstrate that democracies lead to significantly higher levels of media freedom than autocracies, with other things being equal. Within the autocratic spectrum, electoral autocracies, monarchies and military regimes have the freest media, whereas the most illiberal media...